'Load Balancer' is an essential element in distributed systems, designed to distribute network or application traffic across multiple servers. This distribution boosts the servers' efficiency, capacity, and reliability by preventing any individual server from being overburdened with traffic.

Load balancers contribute to more equitable workload distribution, enhancing response times and ensuring the high availability of applications and websites for users. Load balancing can be executed using either hardware solutions (physical devices) or software approaches (programmatic methods).